1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to pictographic character generation methods, and particularly, the present invention discloses an intuitive method of generating a pictographic character based on a portion of a different pictographic character.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Many Asian languages find their roots in the Chinese language, and some incorporate Chinese characters (HanZi) or derivatives thereof in written language, some examples of which would be simplified Chinese, Japanese kanji, and Korean hanja. The earliest known Chinese characters were carved on turtle shells in approximately 6500 B.C., and, as early as 1600 B.C., a complete writing system using Chinese characters was in use in China. Today, basic literacy in Chinese requires knowledge of about 2,000 distinct characters. A person with a college degree should know anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 distinct characters, and possibly more. With great economic gains being made in Mainland China in recent years, study of Chinese language, both written and spoken, is increasing rapidly.
Any student of Chinese should be able to identify any of a set of characters they have already learned, and also be able to find characters that they have not learned yet, but are able to identify some part of. Many Chinese character dictionaries exist to aid users of Chinese language in finding and defining Chinese characters. Some dictionaries divide Chinese characters by sound, using some phonetic system, such as PinYin or ZhuYin, to uniquely identify the characters by a sound. In PinYin, the word for “water” (Shui3) could be found by looking up the PinYin sound “Shui3,” and searching for the correct character among all words that share the sound, “Shui3.” Most dictionaries divide Chinese characters by parts (BuShou). To look up a character, a user goes to a part of the dictionary corresponding to a part of the character, and counts the remaining strokes in the character to find the approximate location of the character in the dictionary. Most dictionaries of this type also include a way to look up each part by a first stroke in the part.
Thus, Chinese characters and derivatives can be identified by sound, recognizable parts, and strokes. However, most students of Chinese have only a spotty vocabulary, and likewise may not be familiar with all of the sounds, parts, or strokes required to locate a character they are trying to find. Further, many recognizable parts of Chinese characters are not used in Chinese dictionaries to identify characters that contain those parts.
With the added functionality of electronic dictionaries, many input methods, which use digital input to search for Chinese characters, have come into popular use, examples of which would be Microsoft PinYin IME®, Natural ZhuYin IME, BoShiaMy, CangJie, and WuBiHua. The first two input methods are phonetic-based methods, which use PinYin and ZhuYin sounds, respectively, to identify a character. The second two methods are radical-based methods, which finds a character based on a radical component part of the character. Finally, WuBiHua is a method that maps five stroke types to the numbers 1-5 on a keypad, and finds a character based on a combination of strokes numbering no more than five strokes, typically the first four strokes in the character followed by the last stroke in the character. The phonetic and stroke methods are relatively easy to use, whereas the radical-based methods require intensive memorization for mastery. Conversely, the radical-based methods are traditionally considered faster, whereas the phonetic and stroke methods lose efficiency due to multiple characters being produced for each input combination.
Quite often, the user does not know a phonetic representation of a character, and also does not recognize any radical of the character. In this case, the WuBiHua method can be used to identify the character. However, this method is very time-consuming and not as intuitive for students. Typically, finding a character using WuBiHua requires identifying four beginning strokes of the character and one finishing stroke of the character, unless the character has fewer than six strokes. Once the correct stroke pattern is inputted, the student often must scroll through many characters to find the desired character.
On their own, all of the above methods present a special challenge to the student of Chinese, and none of them is suitable for general use in aiding students when searching for Chinese characters.